The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 352 pages
• Published by: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Edition: 1st Edition September 28, 1998
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0374525641
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0374525644
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 11.2 ounces

Product Review
Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling. Sherwin Nuland said of the account, "There are no villains in Fadiman's tale, just as there are no heroes. People are presented as she saw them, in their humility and their frailty--and their nobility." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal
YA?A compelling anthropological study. The Hmong people in America are mainly refugee families who supported the CIA militaristic efforts in Laos. They are a clannish group with a firmly established culture that combines issues of health care with a deep spirituality that may be deemed primitive by Western standards. In Merced, CA, which has a large Hmong community, Lia Lee was born, the 13th child in a family coping with their plunge into a modern and mechanized way of life. The child suffered an initial seizure at the age of three months. Her family attributed it to the slamming of the front door by an older sister. They felt the fright had caused the baby's soul to flee her body and become lost to a malignant spirit. The report of the family's attempts to cure Lia through shamanistic intervention and the home sacrifices of pigs and chickens is balanced by the intervention of the medical community that insisted upon the removal of the child from deeply loving parents with disastrous results. This compassionate and understanding account fairly represents the positions of all the parties involved. The suspense of the child's precarious health, the understanding characterization of the parents and doctors, and especially the insights into Hmong culture make this a very worthwhile read.?Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
"The Spirit Catches You And You Fall" is the story of a Hmong family in Merced, California and the cultural clash that ensues when they bring their epileptic infant into the county hospital for treatment. The constant stream of immigration into America from all over the world insures that we have all read many stories about culture clashes. But this one is so extreme that one wonders whether Americans and the Hmongs should ever have been placed on the same planet. It is not only a language barrier that causes problems, but also the very most fundamental assumptions that go into even the most casual conversations. The problems are exacerbated by the Hmongs' belief that the United States promised them significant cash subsidies in exchange for fighting on the Western, or royalist side, against the communists in the Laotian war (which was more or less simultaneous with the Viet Nam war). Needless to say, those cash subsidies were not forthcoming except in the form of the usual benefits available for new immigrants, along with the standard welfare payments. It has become a common complaint (sometimes valid, sometimes not, in my opinion) that immigrants 100 years ago wanted to become assimilated into the American culture as quickly as possible, whereas now they demand that the existing American culture adapt to them. But if you are unhappy with Mexicans or Pakistanis on those grounds, wait till you read about the Hmong! It is really not so much that they demand that Americans adapt to them, but that they cling to their own culture with a ferocity, a stubbornness, and a relentlessness, that is hard to believe. That culture includes animal sacrifices, a highly structured clan system, complex folk tales and hierarchies of spiritual beings, early marriage, and an eye-popping birth rate. The primary focus of the book is how that culture clash made it nearly impossible for the epileptic child to be treated effectively either from the standpoint of Western medicine or in they eyes of the Hmong family who loved her. Fadiman goes into the history of the Hmongs in Asia and how their experiences have hardened them into the people they are now. It is very easy for the American layperson to lump them together with all other Asians, but that would be a huge mistake. Even to refer to them as "Laotians" - as I did before reading this book - would be a serious dismissal of their uniqueness. The Hmong have suffered hardships almost inconceivable in the eyes of modern Americans. The book has no happy endings, and not an awful lot in the way of lessons. Fadiman provides some suggestions for what the American doctors and social workers should have done differently. (It's noteworthy that, like most multiculturalists, she says very little about what the HMONG should have done differently - even though Western medicine is demonstrably far more effective than the Hmong procedures of animal sacrifices and religious ceremonies.) Those suggestions, at the end of the day, would not have changed the outcome - at least not in my opinion. Those suggestions might have avoided some hurt feelings, and that in turn might have given the Hmong community a greater confidence in the doctors in Merced and Fresno. In that respect, things might have been better over the long term than they are now. But the primary lesson I came away with was that there is an almost impenetrable barrier between the two cultures, and that it certainly would have been far better if the Hmong had never been forced to come here. And underlying THAT lesson is the realization of the incredible cruelty that is visited upon otherwise peaceful people when the "Great Powers" make pawns of them in a global conflict. The only reason the Hmong are in Merced is that Southeast Asia was a battleground between the United States and the communist countries, and that each side was willing to use any means to win - even at the cost of the complete destruction of people the like Hmong. I have no hesitation in stating that I think communism was evil, and that we were right to fight it. But did anyone ask the Hmong, and other people like them, whether THEY were willing to pay the price for the victory of democracy? And did we have the right to decide for them? This book will have you thinking about those questions and more, long after you close the last page. And you are unlikely to find easy answers.